An attendee at EclipseCon saw cloud computing as a boon for startups. "This definitely opens up all kinds of opportunities for small startups," said Mike Coon, senior technical staff member at consulting firm Proteus Technologies. "You don't have to worry about your infrastructure in your datacenter going down."

Developers at large enterprises also could benefit, he said. "I think it's a great opportunity to prototype some ideas without having to interact with your own IT center and try to get dedicated resources for something you're trying to build," Coon said.

S3 and EC2 were launched in 2006 and have had a steep growth curve, Vosshall said. S3, for example, stored 800 million objects in 2006 and now stores 40 billion objects.

"At one point, we were spending more bandwidth to serve AWS customers than retail customers," he said.

"The goal of the toolkit is to make it easier to build applications in the cloud on the AWS platform," said Jason Fulghum, software development engineer at Amazon.